Before you start
- An inventory of URLs (crawl export, sitemap, or simple spreadsheet) helps prioritize hubs.
Pick 3–7 hub pages aligned to revenue
Hubs are long guides or category landing pages that answer a whole problem space.
Each supporting article should link up to the hub and sideways to close cousins — not every post to every post.
Hunt orphans with Search Console or a crawler
Orphans are pages with zero internal inlinks — they rely on sitemaps alone and often linger “discovered, not indexed”.
Add contextual links from relevant hubs or related posts within the same edit sprint.
Anchor text: descriptive, varied, honest
Prefer natural phrases over exact-match anchors repeated dozens of times.
Accessibility improves when anchors describe the destination, not “click here”.
Footers and sitewide boxes: less is more
Sitewide “SEO paragraphs” with 50 keyword links signal low quality.
Keep global navigation lean; push depth through in-content links where editorially justified.
Measure impact
After internal link updates, watch impressions for the hub cluster in Search Console over several weeks.
Combine with crawl stats (if available) to see whether Googlebot spends more time on improved sections.